A blog on technology, run by Kozminski University students and supervised by NeRDS

Tag Archives: Steam

For those, who are not interested in Gaming industry, let me explain what kind of platform “Steam” on the Internet.

Valve Cooperation is well-known with its the most popular game “Counter-Strike”. Back in 2003, Valve was facing with problems about updating its own games “Patch”. Providing patches on the Internet website was creating issues for players and many people were not able to play for a while until Valve hot-fix it.

That is why, Valve decided to create a platform to update its own games and also implement anti-cheat programs in easier way. According to Valve’s survey results, around 75% of Valve’s users had high speed Internet access in 2002. Valve Cooperation also realized that the firm can provide game distribution through the platform. Platform was firstly activated for end-users in January, 2003 with a Beta version. The first game was Counter-Strike 1.6, this created brilliant results.

Valve Cooperation also partnered with a lot of game distributors. The main purpose was making game developers to be able to patch and update their games easily. At the beginning Steam was an optional component for the developers. 80.000 to 300.000 tested the beta version in 2003. This way of updating the games took gamers attention because it was an automatic patch platform and the gamer had to do nothing to get it.

By November, 2015, Steam service had over 13 million active users and had over 125 million registered accounts. The platform now give services for all other devices such as consoles, smartphones.

It does not want to stop anymore, there are few competitors for Steam platform such as UPlay, Origin, GOG but I believe Valve already became a Monopoly for this service sector. According to steam database, the platform hit over 14 million active users online. Steam became the largest digital distribution platform for PC games. In October 2013, Screen Digest provided an analysis that Steam was own 75% of the market share estimated. 5 years ago, steam hit 5 million active users in 2012. Only after 5 years, steam hit 14 million active users online, this is incredibly huge numbers even for the Internet. Steam currently has over 12.000 Games on its database to allow users to buy and play those games without any limits that Internet can create. Steam even allows users to play multiplayer games online easily.

Valve Cooperation also get a lot of attentions with its discount events, such as new year events. It is possible to find AAA title games for a cheap price and enjoy download it with a single button to play. This opportunity is getting more and more attention for users.